Rabbit at rest (27 page)

Brewer, too, that torpid hive, speaks to him of himself, of his
past grown awesomely deep, so that things he remembers personally,
V-E day or the Sunday Truman declared war on North Korea, are
history now, which most of the people in the world know about only
from books. Brewer was his boyhood city, the only city he knew. It
still excites him to be among its plain flowerpot-colored
blocks, its brick factories and row housing and great grim churches
all mixed together, everything heavy and solid and built with an
outmoded decorative zeal. The all but abandoned downtown, wide
Weiser Street which he can remember lit up and as crowded as a
fairgrounds in Christmas season, has become a patchwork of rubble
and parking lots and a few new glass-skinned buildings, stabs
at renewal mostly occupied by banks and government agencies, the
stores refusing to come back in from the malls on Brewer's
outskirts. The old Baghdad, once one of a half-dozen
first-run movie theaters along Weiser, now stands between two
vacant lots, its Arab-style tiles all stripped away and its
marquee, that last advertised triple-X double features,
peeling and rusting and holding the letters ELP and on the line
below that SAV ME scrambled remnant of an appeal for historic
restoration. The movie palaces of his boyhood, packed with sweet
odors and dark velvet, murmurs and giggles and held hands, were
history. HELP SAVE ME. There had been a kind of Moorish fountain in
the lobby, colored lights playing on the agitated water. The music
store, Chords 'n' Records, that Ollie Fosnacht used to run twenty
years ago a few doors up from the Baghdad, and that then became
Fidelity Audio, is still a store, called now The Light Fantastic,
selling running shoes, two whole windows of them. Must be a market
for them among the minorities. Mug and run.

In Rabbit's limited experience, the more improvements they've
loaded onto running shoes, the more supporting pads and power
wedges and scientifically designed six-ply soles and so on,
the stiffer and less comfortable they've become: as bad as shoes.
And those running tights the young women wear now, so they look
like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric. green so tight they
show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what
is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to display. Ollie
Fosnacht's estranged wife Peggy died about eight years ago, of
breast cancer that had metastasized. Rabbit reflects that she was
the first woman he has slept with who has died, has actually bitten
the bullet. Then realizes this is not true. There was Jill. He used
to fuck Jill that crazy summer, though he could tell she didn't
much like it. Too young to like it. And maybe that whore in Texas
who with a curious drawling courtesy made him an unvirgin is dead
now too. They don't have long lives, with the hours, the booze, the
beatings.

And the drugs that most of them are into, and AIDS. But, then,
who does live forever? We all take a beating. Must be the way they
figure, it's sooner or later. They're just like us only more so.
These guys in prison now who bite the guards to give them AIDS with
their saliva. We're turning into mad dogs -the human race is
one big swamp of viruses.

Back from the hollow center of Brewer, in the tight brick rows
built a century ago when the great mills now abandoned or turned
into factory outlet stores still smoked and vibrated, spinning
textiles and casting steel, life goes on as lively as ever, though
in a darker shade. He likes cruising these streets. In April at
least they brim with innocent energy. Four leggy young blacks
cluster about a bicycle being repaired. A Hispanic girl in the
late-afternoon slant of sun steps out of her narrow slice of
a house in high silk heels and a lilac-colored party dress
and a diagonal purple sash and at her waist a great cloth rose: she
is a flower, the moment says, and a swarm ofboys has gathered,
jostling, bumbling, all dressed in steelgray windbreakers and green
Army pants, a gang uniform of sorts, Harry supposes. In Brewer
people still use the streets, they sit out on their steps and
little porches in an expectant way you never see in Deleon. And the
Pennsylvania row houses take a simple square approach to shelter,
not so different from those cities of aligned cereal boxes the
teacher had you set up with cut-out doors and
crayoned-on windows in first grade; it makes Harry happy
after his winter in Florida with its condominiums interwoven with
golf courses, its tile-roofed towers of time-shared
apartments, its villages that aren't villages, its thousand
real-estate angles and prettifications of the flimsy.

In the slate-gray two-door Celica he and Janice lock
into their garage when they take the pearl-gray Canny wagon
south in the fall, he feels safe gliding along and attracts not too
many stares, though in the tough section near the tracks, on the
rounded corner step of a boarded-up tavern, a little rounded
dark girl in a sweatshirt sits in the lap of a boy already
barechested though the spring air is still chilly, and alternately
kisses him with a languid and determined open mouth and gazes
insolently at the cars streaming by. The half-naked boy is
too stoned to stare, perhaps, but she gives Harry a look through
the Celica's side window that would wipe him away if it could. Fuck
her. Fuck him, her eyes say. She seemed to sense what he was doing,
rolling by, trying to steal a little life for himself out of the
south Brewer scene, all these lives that are young and rising like
sap where his is old and sinking.

There has been a lot of living in these tired streets. The old
row houses have been repainted, residinged, updated with aluminum
awnings and ironwork railings themselves grown old. They are slots
still being filled, with street numbers the builders set in
stained-glass fanlights above the doors. The blocks were
built solid, there would never be any renumbering. Once he lived in
one of these - number 326, the number of his hospital room
reminded him - with Ruth, and used to shop for quick
necessities at that corner store there, now called ROSA'S GROCERIES
(Tienda de Comestibles),
and stare out the window at the
rose window of a limestone church now become the PAL
Community
Center / Centro Comunidad.
The city is quicker than he
remembers it, faster on the shuffle, as the blocks flicker by, and
buildings that he felt when a boy were widely spaced now appear
adjacent. The coughdrop factory, the skyscraper courthouse, the Y
where he tried to take swimming lessons and caught pneumonia
instead, coming out into the winter streets with wet hair, are all
around corners from one another, and close to the post office with
its strange long empty lobby, busy and lighted only at one end
where a grate or two is up, and to the Ben Franklin, a proud gilded
downtown hotel now a Ramada Motor Inn. There his class, Mt. Judge
'51, had its senior prom, he in a summer tux and Mary Ann in a
lavender satin strapless gown whose crinoline petticoats gave them
so much trouble in the car afterward they had to laugh, her round
white thighs lost in all those rustling folds and hems, Easter eggs
in a papery nest, her underpants damp from all the dancing, a
spongy cotton pillow, stuffed with her moss, a powerful moist musk
scent, Mary Ann the first woman whose smell he made his own, all of
her his own, every crevice, every mood, before he went off to do
his two years in the Army and she without a word of warning married
somebody else. Maybe she sensed something about him. A loser.
Though at eighteen he looked like a winner. Whenever he went out
with Mary Ann, knowing she was his to harvest in the warm car, the
blue family Plymouth, he felt like a winner, offhand, calm, his
life set at an irresistible forward slant.

Two blocks toward the mountain from the Ben Franklin, under
Eisenhower Avenue where it lifts up in a wooden-railed hump
to pass over, the laborers of old hand-dug a great trench to
bring the railroad tracks into the city, tracks disused now, and
the cut, walled in limestone, a pit for tossing beer cans and soda
bottles down into, whole garbage bags even, mattresses; Brewer was
always a tough town, a railroad town, these blocks along the tracks
full of tough men, bleary hoboes who'd offer to blow you for a
quarter, sooty hotels where card games went on for days, bars whose
front windows were cracked from the vibration of the trains going
past, the mile-long trains of coal cars pulling right across
Weiser, stopping all traffic, like the time he and Ruth waited for
one to pass, the neon lights of a long-gone Chinese
restaurant flickering in her many-colored hair.

These red-painted bricks, these imitation gray stones,
have seen heartbreaking things but don't know it. A block or two
toward the mountain from Ruth's old street - Summer Street it
was, though they had lived there in spring, summer spelled their
end Rabbit is suddenly driving in a white tunnel, trees on both
sides of the street in white blossoms, the trees young and oval in
shape and blending one into the other like clouds, the sky's high
blue above tingeing the topmost blossoms as it does the daytime
moon. And up top where there is most light the leaves are beginning
to unfold, shiny and small and heart-shaped, as he knows
because he is moved enough to pull the Celica to the curb and park
and get out and pull off a single leaf to study, as if it will be a
clue to all this glory. Along the sidewalk in this radiant long
grove shadowy people push baby carriages and stand conversing by
their steps as if oblivious of the beauty suspended above them,
enclosing them, already shedding a confetti of petals: they are in
Heaven. He wants to ask one of them the name of these trees, and
how they came to be planted here in these hard brick blocks of
Brewer, luxuriant as the ficus trees that line the avenues of
Naples down in Florida, but feels shy in their gaze toward him,
himself a shadow in this filtered tunnel light of blossoms, a
visitor, an intruder from the past, and figures they would not know
anyway, or if they did know would think him too strange for
asking.

But Janice knows. When he describes this experience to her, she
says, "Those are these Bradford pear trees the city is planting
everywhere the old elms and buttonwoods are dying off. It blossoms
but doesn't bear any fruit, and is very hardy in city conditions.
It doesn't mind carbon dioxide or any of that."

"Why have I never seen them before?"

"You have, Harry, I'm sure. They've been putting them in for ten
years now at least. There've been articles in the paper. One of the
girls over at the club's husband is on the Improvement
Commission."

"I never saw anything like it. It broke me all up."

She is busy re-establishing them in the Penn Park house,
cleaning away the winter's cobwebs and polishing the Koerner silver
her mother left her, and she moves away from him impatiently.
"You've seen, it's just you see differently now."

Since his heart attack, she means. Since nearly dying. He
faintly feels with Janice now like one of the dead they used to say
came back and watched over the survivors, living with them
invisibly like the mice in the walls. She often doesn't seem to
hear him, or take him quite seriously. She goes off across Brewer
to visit Nelson and Pru and their children in Mt. Judge, or to
remake acquaintance with her female buddies over at the Flying
Eagle Country Club, where the clay tennis courts are being rolled
and readied and the golf course is already green and receiving
play. And she is looking for a job. He thought she had been kidding
after seeing
Working Girl,
but no, the women her age
almost all do something now - one of her tennis buddies is a
physical therapist with muscles in her arms and shoulders like you
wouldn't believe, and another, Dons Eberhardt, who used to be Doris
Kaufmann, has become a diamond expert and takes the bus over to New
York practically every week and carries hundreds of thousands of
dollars' worth of gems back and forth, and a third woman she knows
works in the booming new field of de-asbestosizing homes and
buildings like factories and schools. It seems there's no end of
old asbestos to ferret out. Janice thinks she might go into real
estate. A friend of a friend works mostly on weekends and makes
over fifty thousand a year in commissions.

Harry asks her, "Why not go over and help Nelson run the lot?
Something's going flooey over there."

"That's no fun, hiring myself. And you know how sensitive Nelson
is at the idea of us interfering."

"Yeah - why is that?"

Janice has all the answers, now that she is back with her female
crowd of know-it-alls over at the Flying Eagle.
"Because he's grown up in the shadow of a dominating father."

"I'm
not
dominating. I'm a pushover, if you ask
me."

"You are to him. Psychologically dominating. You're certainly a
lot taller. And were a wonderful athlete."

"Were is right. A wonderful athlete whose doctors say he has to
ride a golf cart and not do anything more violent than brisk
walking."

"And you don't
do
it, Harry. I haven't seen you walk
further than to the car and back."

"I've been doing some gardening."

"If you can call it that."

He likes to get out into their yard toward the end of the day
and break off last year's dead flower stalks and bone-white
old poke plants and burn them in a fire kindled on the day's
newspaper, the Brewer
Standard.
The lawn needed a mowing
badly when they arrived and the bulb beds should have been
uncovered in March. The snowdrops and crocuses came and went while
they were in Florida; the hyacinths are at their peak and the
tulips up but still with pointy green heads. Rabbit feels peace at
the moment of the day when the light dims and the weeping cherry
glows in the dusk, its florets like small pink bachelor buttons and
the whole droop-branched womanly forgiving shape of it
gathering to itself a neon pallor as the shadows lengthen and
dampen; the earth's revolution advances a bit more and the scraps
of sunlight linger longer under the April sky with its jet trails
and icy horsetails, just a few golden rags caught in the shaggy
forsythia over toward the neighboring mansion built of thin yellow
bricks, and the struggling hemlock, and the tallest of the
rhododendrons by the palisade fence you see from the kitchen
window. Janice put up a bird feeder in the hemlock a few falls ago,
even though Doris Kaufmann or some other busybody told her it was
cruel to birds to put up a feeder when you weren't there in the
winter, a plastic sphere tilted like Saturn, and he fills it with
sunflower seed when he thinks of it. Putting up bird feeders was
the sort of thing her mother used to do but would never have
occurred to Janice when they were younger and old Bessie was still
alive. Our genes keep unfolding as long as we five. Harry tastes in
his teeth a sourness that offended him on his father's breath. Poor
Pop. His face yellowed like a dried apricot at the end. Bessie had
the feeders all on wires and poles in her Joseph Street back yard
to frustrate the squirrels. The copper beech by their old bedroom,
with the nuts that would pop on their own all night, attracted the
squirrels, she would say, making her lap and setting her hands on
her knees as if God had cooked up squirrels just to bedevil her.
Harry had liked Bessie, though she screwed him in her will. Never
forgave him for that time in '59. Died of diabetes and its
circulatory complications the day after Princess Di gave birth to
little Prince William, the last living thing Bessie was interested
in, would there be a future king of England? - that and the
Hinckley trial, she thought they should hang the boy on the steps
of the Capitol, right there in the sunshine, letting him off as
insane was a scandal. The old lady was terrified of having her legs
amputated at the end the way her own mother had. Harry can even
remember Bessie's mother's name. Hannah. Hannah Koerner. Hard to
believe he will ever be as dead as Hannah Koerner.